A Brother Made of Fire
by The Lady Morana
Summary: 80 years before Itachi and Sasuke there was another set of rival Uchiha brothers, the wild Izuna and the plotting Madara. WARNINGS: none


AN: Yes I know I said I quite Naruto and I did! I'm done! … I'm just also unfortunately an insomniac with little better to do at 1:00 am. So you may stumble across these sleep deprivation induced fics, don't take them seriously all they are in the inability to make a clean break with a fandom that spent 2 and half years a major part of my writing.

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If the eyes are the window to the soul then the day I stole my brother's eyes I must also have taken his soul. I most certainly got something more then I bargained for. Absolute power is what I wanted; absolute insanity is what I got.

My little brother was my match in almost everything. From the day he was born I knew we would be rivals in life. At six years old I stood before my father, a proud son with pinwheel eyes, and turned to my little brother.

"Catch up to me if you can Izuna." I taunted. I remember the way he attempted to keep control of the cold exterior our clan favored and I watched the way fire in his blood and personality threatened to embarrass him in front of strict father. He did not answer me then, but rather waited seven years.

It was late at night when he found me on his twelfth birth. Blood spattered his high pale cheek bones and tears wet his face, but his eyes were wild with triumph. Slowly I watched them change. The delicate brush stroke tomoe thickened in to three bars that ringed his pupil. I moved to cry out but he caught my wrist and held a pale finger to his lips.

"Catch up to me if you can Madara." The insanity danced on his tongue and in his eyes even as the Mangekyo faded back to blackness. Like he had years ago I remained silent, but I did not wait years to meet his challenge. It was only two weeks later that I dare flick my eyes up to his, my tomoe enlarged and bleeding together. And he laughed as though revelation were a great joke to him. His laughter earned him a lecture from our father the proper control of emotion, and it occurred to me that our father didn't know he was lecturing a boy that could destroy him with a single look.

My brother could have lead our clan to greatness, could have surpassed me one final time and become a great leader, but he didn't. It was because that would have meant trying in the one area that he failed to be my equal in; it was the one area that he didn't even attempt to match at, being an Uchiha. My brother was all at once wild and excitable, passionate and attention seeking. If he thought he said it, if he felt it he expressed it. My mother use to shake her head and say,

"That boy has more fire in his personality then he knows what to do with, it's going to burn him up one day." And as I watched my wild brother grow, I couldn't help but agree with her and send up a heartfelt pray that I was nowhere near when the fire in Izuna's soul leapt up and burned the fool to a crisp.

When I was eighteen I harnessed my brother's fire and used it to burn my place in leader of our clan. To this day I can't tell which of us our clansmen fear and respected more: me with my water heavy personality that balanced out my fire natured chakra or my brother with more wild fire then a volcano.

I had always assumed that it would be my brother who would lose his eyesight first. The fool was unsparing and undiscriminating in his usage of them while I plotted and connived and used my Mangekyo only as a last resort. So it came as shock when my vision blurred while his stayed sharp and true. I began to fret, my clansmen where ambitious and sly with Izuna's frankness being the expectation rather than the rule. If they learned of my weakness they would have had my title before I could even see them coming and I became painfully aware of my need for my little brother.

I waited for him to come back from the site of our clan's most recent fight with the Senju. When I met him he was covered in blood as he always was. Ever since his fateful sixth birthday, if he had killing to do he'd get as much as his victims sticky red life force on him as possible.

"Brings out my eyes." He'd quip if anyone dared to question his messy killing style that was so at odds with the rest of our clans' neat precision. As I drew near to him even my failing eyes could see that the blood he sported tonight wasn't all someone else's. There was a long gash down his arm and as soon as it healed he'd be flashing it around with a story that got increasingly fantastic. I knew that if I wanted the truth behind this most recent wound I'd have to ask right that moment, but I didn't particularly care. I had only one thing on my mind.

"I need your eyes." Years of living with him had taught me that bluntness was the only way to get something from him; subtlety didn't so much go over his head as it went completely ignored.

"My eyes Madara?" And for the first time in his life the fool seemed to truly consider what he was being asked, but I could see the wickedness tugging at his lips, "I hardly think they'd match your complexion."

"My complexion?" I half sneered trust my brother to take nothing seriously.

"Yes you see your eyes are black like an ink stone and mine are like back drop to the stars." His hands flickered about at a rate that anyone not blessed with the sharingan would have found truly dizzying.

"I never knew you were so poetic." He smiled so widely I was sure he was going to pull the muscle in his face.

"I am quite artistic big brother, it's the only area you have no hope of defeating me in."

"Oh really?"

"Yes, you haven't an artistic thread in your soul." He seemed truly pitying. "Which is why I shall give you my eyes." I blinked at him. Talking to my brother was a nigh on impossible feat and I often felt that it would be more productive bang my head in to a wall repeatedly. I always ended up with a headache regardless.

"What?"

"My eyes. That's what you wanted yes?" He was wearing that look of his that suggested that _I_ was the crazy one. "I am giving them to you. If you go blind you'll never learn to recognize art. I have already had that joy, and I can't deny you it. With my eyes you'll learn the meaning of beauty." For a moment I nearly argued, this was hardly the type of thing to charge into fool hearted, but I held my tongue, it was in my best interest.

It wasn't until Izuna's eyes were firmly in my head that I worried that I too had acted to brashly. For three days my entire being rebel against these tiny portals into my brother's blazing inferno of a soul. When the battle settled and the bandage removed from my eyes I assumed the worst was over. I went to my brother's bedside to see how my now blind brother faired.

_Ugh. I'm a mess._ The thought whispered through my head in my brother voice.

"What?" I asked aloud.

"I didn't say anything." Izuna rasped. His voice was different then I remember it and on closure inspection everything from the expression on his to the tension in his legs was different then I remembered. I wrote it off as trauma the surgery and thought no more of it, until the doctors declared him fully recovered.

In the days and weeks following his recovery it was obvious that something intangible had changed in my little brother. It was most obvious to me and the others in the wound on his arm. People went to him, eager though they'd never admit it, to hear his wild tails.

"Izuna! Izuna! We heard you were injured. What happened?" And instead of a wild story involving near death horrors, gravity deifying leaps, and forbidden love his listeners simply received,

"I miscalculated the projectile range of my opponent." And that, looking back, marked the first instance foreshadowing my clan's betrayal of me. I still could never hope tell you which of us they feared more, but I can tell you that my clan loved my brother more than anything. They blamed his sudden change in personality on me, as though I had taken the water from my personality and use it to smooth the fire in his.

Less noticeable by the clan, but certain more noticeable to me was the change in myself. My first thought upon seeing my new eyes in the mirror was,

_Damn Izuna was right; the black of his eyes really doesn't match my complexion. I'm too parchment pale, these eyes need starlight skin to look their best. _Which was a thought that I was almost sure wasn't my own.

I would wake some mornings to take issue to the way my breakfast appeared on my plate. Moving until it looked good enough to eat, annoying habit that my brother no longer seemed to posses.

When he died in battle, as result of his handicapped state, I felt the clan pull away from me for a second time and I felt the voice in my head that sounded so much like Izuna strengthen.

I didn't truly believe I'd lost my mind, despite the voice and the change in personality, till I was reading a status report from one of ninja.

_His handwriting is terribly unbalanced. You really should do something about that, it's most unpleasant to look at. _I pressed the heels of my hands to my brother's eyes and murmured,

"I swear I can hear Izuna sometimes."

_Well of course you can! I'm right here; I could hardly expect you to learn to appreciate art on your own. _

So now eighty years later, after that foul treaty with the Senju and the betrayal of my clan, as I hide ranks of the feared and illusive Akasuki I let little Izuna out to play. And watch with vague amusement as his fire chafes at and endears him to a whole new group of people under that ridiculous pseudonym of his choosing.

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The End

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